Microphone Performance

The microphone of the AQIRYS Alnair was tested by connecting the headset to the PC using the supplied USB-C dongle. To review the microphone's sound and compare it to similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, both of which fall into the studio monitor category. I connected them to the Topping A90 Discrete, a high-quality headphone amplifier and speaker preamplifier. The EVGA NU Audio Pro sound card handled the digital-to-analog conversion, connected to Topping's excellent unit with the AudioQuest Evergreen RCA cable. Testing was done in Discord and Audacity, and I also used Audacity to record the sound from the microphone. The sound was recorded with microphone sensitivity set to 100% and not post-processed or edited in any way.

For reference, this voice recording was made with the Rode NT-USB, a high-quality studio microphone:



This is the sound recorded by using the detachable omnidirectional microphone of the SteelSeries AQIRYS Alnair.



As you can hear, the AQIRYS Alnair's microphone sounds muffled, but in terms of speech intelligibility it's decent enough to remain usable for chatting over Discord and other VoIP apps. The capsule provides enough gain, and there are no issues with plosives, primarily thanks to the unidirectional pickup pattern. The capsule isn't particularly sensitive to micropositioning, so you don't have to worry about tiny adjustments to make it sound better. As long as it's relatively close to your mouth, you're good to go.

For comparison, I'm using two competing wireless gaming headsets, with the Corsair HS80 RGB Wireless being similarly priced to the AQIRYS Alnair, and the HyperX Cloud Flight costing around $20 more. Both surpass it in terms of microphone quality by quite a margin.




The AQIRYS Alnair has a secondary internal pinhole microphone, which is activated when the main microphone is detached. While its main purpose is to enable you to do phone calls while using the headset in Bluetooth mode, when on the go, the internal microphone works both in Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi mode, so you can resort to it any time you want to use the Alnair in its most compact form. The quality of this secondary microphone is solid; perhaps it's slightly too eager when trying to suppress background noise, but I found it completely usable, to a point where sometimes I wouldn't even bother plugging the main microphone in.